By Tina Bebbington and Christian Schmidt, UVic Libraries
UVic Libraries has embraced AI Literacy as a core competency for all librarians and library staff, and are working towards this goal across several platforms, including the creation of an AI Literacy Task Force in 2023. The AI Literacy Task Group have created a variety of tools to support the development of AI literacy in reference and instruction that are sharable, adaptable and promoted across campus.
With AskAway starting up in the new term, UCW wanted to share some information about their institution that might be helpful for service providers.
The new Open Education tag allows us to track those questions when a service provider explains or provides access to Open Access, Open Education, or Open Textbook resources. This includes questions about no-cost textbook options, for example a student looking for an older version of a textbook from the library. In celebration of this new tag, Elizabeth Padilla (BCIT) shares the B.C. Open Collection and her role in developing the new home for the collection.
It has been almost a year since UBC Library implemented OpenAthens for e-resource authentication. Many thanks for all of your help in supporting our users transitioning to the new process. We have heard that accessing UBC’s e-resources via OpenAthens as an AskAway service provider can be tricky. We have updated the wording on the Guest Login page as follows, and we hope it clarifies the issue.
The UNBC library is undergoing significant renovations for the next few months, including temporarily moving our circ and reference desks from the first to the second floor and slightly modifying our study rooms (including adding two new ones!). Please refer students with questions about this to our blog for the most recent information: https://libguides.unbc.ca/blog.
In case any of you are assisting KPU folks on AskAway, just a heads up that we have recently launched a new service for mailing out print items.
You can direct questions to the “Mail-to-me” page, located on our COVID-19 guide here: https://libguides.kpu.ca/COVID19response/mailtome
I’d like to tell you about a resource you can use to help students and other AskAway patrons access research relevant to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).
The Research Access Portal (RAP) is an easy-to-use resource that makes research relevant to the DTES more accessible and easier to discover. We provide access to academic materials such as scholarly articles and theses, as well as community materials such as reports, historical newsletters, and other, more accessible forms of scholarship such as clear language research summaries, podcasts, and more. We have been working with researchers to help make more than 70 per cent of these items freely available to anyone. That means that most of this material does not require a subscription or institutional log-in to access.
Just a heads up that you may be receiving questions via chat about library notices. We recently turned on our recall and overdue notices as normal circulation borrowing periods have started again. If you receive a question about this, the key thing is to reassure the patron that any fines accrued during the COVID period will be waived (March onward).
